By now, we’ve all heard that Ridley Scott’s Body of Lies failed to make a splash at the box office this weekend. That’s bad news, folks. And not just for Warner Brothers, who is on the hook for the film’s $100 million+ budget. It also signals the end of an era for one of the go-to tricks in the pretty-boy-actor-who-wants-to-be-taken-seriously playbook: Going ugly.
It used to be that all a pretty-boy actor had to do to cultivate some acting street cred was pack on 40 pounds or replicate male-pattern baldness or grow some shitty facial hair, and then pass himself off as a Palin-esque Joe SixPack or a down-on-his-luck underdog. The list of actors who have gone ugly is long and illustrious: De Niro in Raging Bull. Pitt in Twelve Monkeys. Clooney in Syriana. Vince Vaughn in The Breakup (our friends try to tell us that Vaughn is just a doughy lump of manflesh, but we know better). For the most part, going ugly has netted those actors either boffo box office numbers or critical acclaim or both.
But that all ends with Body of Lies. The film features one of the all-time prettiest pretty-boys, Leonardo DiCaprio, sporting a greasy chinstrap that looks more like a bird-eating spider than a beard. Despite the fact that DiCaprio has made a career of going ugly to varying degrees of success, this attempt does little more than distract the audience from every scene he’s in, leaving you wondering, “What the fuck is on Leo’s chin?” And Russell Crowe tries to replicate his earlier success in going ugly in The Insider by sporting a belt-bulging paunch, but it just seems stale this go around. It’s like Crowe suggested to Ridley Scott that his character be depicted as a sloppy fat-ass because he wanted a reason to eat a bunch of doughnuts.
With Body of Lies taking a whoopin’ at the box office and neither DiCaprio or Crowe’s performances receiving rave reviews (much less putting them on anyone’s Oscar shortlist), the draw of going ugly is immediately brought into question. That can’t be good news for guys like Matt Damon (going ugly by packing on the pounds for The Informant) or Bruce Willis (going ugly with a big belly and a bigger beard in What Just Happened?).
From now on, actors need to leave the ugly roles to actors who have a natural advantage in that area, like Steve Buscemi and Philip Seymour Hoffman and Vince Vaughn (just kidding. Kind of.). There’s plenty of work for the pretty boys playing super-spies and romantic comedy goofballs.
(If you like this kind of shit, you might like what we do over at our own blog, YouTubeReviewed.)
